Fernando Gasparian

Fernando Gasparian (born January 27, 1930 in São Paulo ; † October 7, 2006 ibid) was a Brazilian industrialist and publisher of Armenian origin. As a politician and in his newspapers, he campaigned for democracy and against the dependence of his country on foreign investors.

Life

Fernando Gasparian was born in 1930 to a Brazilian-Armenian family in São Paulo who worked in the textile business.

After studying engineering, Gasparian took over the magazine Jornal de Debates with his friends Rubens Paiva (later a member of the Bundestag; was murdered by the military), Almino Alfonso and Marcos Pereira in 1953 . It pursued a Brazil-oriented line that rejected excessive foreign investment and the privatization of the state oil company Petrobras .

In 1964, Gasparian bought America Textil , a large textile company in Rio de Janeiro that had gotten into trouble and was backed by Banco do Brasil . After the US-backed right-wing military coup against President João Goulart's civil government , Gasparian, the founder of the Brazilian Democratic Movement, became a target for the military. The financing of his companies through banks was prevented. After another shift to the right by the military government in 1969, Gasparian left Brazil and found a teaching position at St Antony's College , Oxford .

In 1972 he returned to Brazil and founded the critical magazine Opinião , which in turn aroused the displeasure of the dictatorship. He also acquired the publishing house Paz e Terra . Over time it became a powerhouse of political and social thought and liberation theology . Alceu Amoroso Lima , Celso Furtado , Hélio Jaguaribe , Fernando Henrique Cardoso , Octavio Paz , Torcuato di Tella , Alain Touraine , Brian Van Arkadie , Dudley Seers and Paulo Freire are among the publisher's authors.

In 1973 Gasparian returned to Oxford for a few months to start the monthly Cadernos de Opinião . The second edition aroused the displeasure of the military with a lecture text by Hélder Câmara , the militant Archbishop of Olinda and Recife. Gasparian was charged by the military regime with "endangering national security". He was eventually acquitted. But in 1976 the military detonated a bomb in his publishing offices.

When the dictatorship gave way to a democratic government, Gasparian devoted more time to politics. In 1985 he supported the campaign of his friend Fernando Henrique Cardoso to be elected mayor of São Paulo. In 1986 Gasparian was elected to the constituent assembly, where he served until 1988. There he campaigned for a maximum limit of 12 percent for interest on bank loans, for financial support for agricultural reform, for limiting foreign investments in mining and for the abolition of the death penalty even in times of war.

From 1993 to 1995 Gasparian was a member of the Latin American Parliament. He got more and more into conflict with Cardoso after he won the presidential election in 1995. Gasparian publicly criticized him in the same year for his excessive dependence on foreign banks, which were lured to Brazil by high interest rates.

Gasparian was the father of three sons and one daughter.

Web links

• Obituary in The Independent (English)